A quiet subversive on the mound

Picture a fire-baller who took the mound almost every night from January through December, tossed three games in a day and 2,500 over a career, and pitched his last big-league contest at the nature-defying age of 59.

Leroy “Satchel’’ Paige did all that at a time when players relied on their skills, not steroids, salaries were measured in thousands rather than millions, and no one had heard of a pitch count or of Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, or any of the other bad boys of contemporary baseball. Today, on what would have been Satchel’s 103d birthday, is a good time to revisit a less troubled era in our national pastime and a more troubled one in our race relations.

No athlete has ever made a better case than Satchel Paige for sports being about athleticism and fun. Supersized feats were his long suit. His favorite was calling in his outfielders. He summoned them when the batter was positioning himself at the plate, making it clear that merely lifting the ball out of the infield meant an automatic hit. It was a dare if not an insult. He did it for the first time when he was a boy in Mobile, Ala. His teammates had committed three straight errors and he was determined to show them up, no matter that the bases were loaded and his lead was just 1-0 with two outs in the ninth. Batter up. Three strikes. Point made.

The crowd ate it up and Satchel did it again. And again. Sometimes it was the infielders, too. They would sit and watch, talk among themselves, and play poker or at least pretend to. Usually it was with the game in the bag, or against a weak semi-pro club, but not always. He tried it more than once with the game on the line against foes in the racially-segregated Negro Leagues, and against big-league bashers like Jimmy Foxx.

There was less risk in the antics spotlighting his pinpoint control, since most came before the game. Satchel’s favorite foil was a soft book of matches. He laid it on home plate, then threw eight of 10 pitches directly over it. Other targets of choice: a stamp, the knob atop a baseball cap, and a gum wrapper, preferably Wrigley’s spearmint. The gum went into his mouth, the silver wrapper on home plate, the ball right over the wrapper.

Numbers are part of any athletic epic, but finding and comparing statistics was more problematic in the Negro Leagues, which could not afford the record keepers the Majors had. Satchel defied that shadowy system by keeping his own ledgers. The Paige almanac had him pitching in more than 2,500 games and winning 2,000 or so. He professed to have labored for 250 teams and thrown 250 shutouts. Other claims that would have set records: 50 no-hitters, 29 starts in a month, 21 straight victories, and three wins the same day.

Just when any serious statistician might be tempted to dismiss it as a ruse, closer scrutiny suggests that much of it was true. Pitching 2,500 games seems inconceivable since the Major League record-holder, Jesse Orosco, managed just 1,252. But Orosco’s numbers are just for the big leagues, where he pitched 24 years starting every April and ending, when he was lucky, in October. Satchel’s include games played as a semi-pro and professional, in the Negro Leagues, on barnstorming tours, in Latin America and Canada as well as the United States, and in the Major and Minor Leagues. He played spring and summer, fall and winter. He often threw just three or four innings, but he did it every day or couple of days for 41 years. By that schedule, pitching 2,500 games amounts to slightly more than 60 games a year, which does not seem high enough.

But there is more to Satchel’s legacy than eye-popping records. While many dismissed him as a Stepin Fetchit if not an Uncle Tom, he was something else entirely - a quiet subversive, defying Uncle Tom and Jim Crow. He refused to play in a town unless it supplied lodging and food to him and his teammates, a defiance for which young civil rights workers later would get arrested.

Satchel’s loudest claims for equality came on the field. He pitched spectacularly enough, especially when his teams were beating the best of the white major leaguers, that white sportswriters turned out to watch black baseball. He proved that black fans would fill ballparks and that white fans would turn out to see black superstars. He drew the spotlight first to himself, then to his all-black Kansas City Monarchs team, and inevitably to the Monarchs’ rookie second baseman Jackie Robinson. As one veteran Negro Leaguer put it, Jackie may have opened the door to the new racial reality when he signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1945, but it was Satchel who had inserted the key a full generation before.

Larry Tye, a former Boston Globe reporter, is the author of “Satchel: The Life and Times of an American Legend.’’